Spirit and Matter, Life and Death

Schmidt Number: S-3347

On-line since: 31st May, 2016

Immortality, the Forces of Destiny, and the Course of Life

Berlin, 1 March 1917

What makes it hard to come close to spiritual science with full
understanding is that it has to think not only different from
the usual consciousness about certain life riddles about life
riddles of which many people believe that they are not
accessible to the human cognition at all, some even that they
lie beyond reality, but that it gets to a thinking that is
different in its whole form from the thinking of the usual
consciousness. Spiritual science gets to a thinking that has to
be unfolded from the usual consciousness first. However, one
can say that the development of the intellectual culture has
come to many ideas and mental pictures in the nineteenth
century and up to our time that are on the way to this
spiritual science. Even if the suitable attempts deviate from
spiritual science radically, they still demand knowledge of
certain life riddles and world riddles that head to spiritual
science.

There I am allowed to point in particular to the idea, to the
mental picture of the unconscious or as one would better say of
the subconscious in the human soul life. Let us look at this
unconscious or subconscious. Although the most different people
interpret it quite different, finally, one still thinks that
something rests in the depths of the human soul that actually
constitutes the basis of the human soul that cannot be reached
with the usual day consciousness. So that one may say, those
who speak of the subconscious or unconscious in the human soul
speak in such a way of the fact that one realises that they are
convinced that the real being of the soul with all that cannot
be grasped which the human being can bring in his usual
consciousness and also in the usual scientific consciousness.
One can say, as far as this mental picture has just been
characterised here, spiritual science can comply with it
strictly speaking. But it is the destiny of spiritual science
that it has to comply with some worldviews from a certain
viewpoint that it has to take ways different from those which
indicate these world views. There we immediately get to
something that the representatives of the subconscious or
unconscious mean but in which spiritual science must differ
from them.

These representatives of the unconscious mean that the
unconscious or subconscious has to remain in the depths of the
soul at any price, that it never is able to appear in the usual
consciousness. Hence, also Eduard von Hartmann (1842-1906) who
made the unconscious mostly popular in the last half a century
was of the opinion that one cannot get to know anything of the
being of the soul or of nature by immediate knowledge, by
experience, by observing. He thinks that one can form mental
pictures of it only hypothetically how it looks in the world of
the unconscious or subconscious. In this point, spiritual
science cannot go along. Since I have characterised in the
previous talks how spiritual science just realises that,
indeed, this unconscious or subconscious rests for the usual
knowledge in the depths of the soul that it can be brought up,
however, under certain circumstances. You can bring it up if
that consciousness is developed which I have called the
“beholding consciousness,” referring to Goethe's
concept of the “beholding faculty of judgement.”
Goethe gave an important suggestion with it. This suggestion
could not be developed in his time completely. But spiritual
science regards it as its task not to generate all kinds of
phantasms, but just to develop it on serious scientific ground
for what Goethe gave the suggestion with his concept of the
beholding faculty of judgement. I have explained in my book
How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds? how the
human soul gets to this faculty of beholding judgement or to
the beholding consciousness. However, what forms the basis of
this faculty of the beholding judgement will become obvious
from a certain viewpoint in this talk in particular.

On
the one hand, spiritual science is urged to take ways different
from those that the representatives of the unconscious want to
go; it is on the other hand in full harmony just with the
scientific results of our time. It has to go another way than
the scientific research, just because it complies more with
natural sciences than the scientific view often with
itself.

What concerns now the question of the real soul being, natural
sciences think that the soul is dependent on the human body. I
have often said here that it would be a wild-goose chase to
defend myself from any viewpoint against this view. Nothing
seems clearer, even if natural sciences have still to work a
lot, that the course of the whole human life shows this
dependence of the soul on the bodily organisation during its
development. One needs only to realise how the human being
develops organically from the child to the adult, and that with
this development the soul development runs in parallel that
with the development of the organs which natural sciences
regard as tools of the soul life also this soul life grows.

If
one adds the fact that by deterioration of health or of the
organic coherence of certain body parts the soul life is
undermined, it results from it that the scientific world view
is right in this field. In addition, it can also show that
again with the gradual decrease of the forces, with growing
old, these soul forces decrease in parallel with the bodily
organisation. Only a dilettante could make an objection to this
view. Against it, spiritual science stands absolutely on the
ground of the scientific results. However, I would like to note
that spiritual science still complies in a much deeper sense
just by its knowledge with these results than natural sciences
themselves can do it. This can become obvious in particular if
one looks at a direction of soul life that many people confuse
with spiritual science. All possible unclear mystic mental
pictures and experiences are brought forward if one criticises
spiritual science, and then one confuses it with these unclear,
mystic reveries.

If
you occupy yourself just spiritual-scientifically more
thoroughly with that what has been called mysticism in
different times, something very noteworthy appears not with
all, but with many things. You can look at the most respected
mystics and you clearly realise with them that the modern
scientific worldview is right if it often assigns no
epistemological value to these mystic attempts for the real
riddles of soul and humanity.

Indeed, the experiences of the mystics are interesting. I would
like to argue nothing against the objective consideration of
the mystic experiences but more against the fundamental of the
matter; I would like to characterise this simply. Mystics try
what is a right way also in the spiritual-scientific sense to
get to deeper experience by that which they call the
“union of the soul with the universal spirit or with the
divine” which leads away from the outer sensory reality.
However, how do they try this mostly? They try it while they
refine the usual everyday consciousness and deepen it with all
kinds of inwardness, but they stop at this usual consciousness.
Now spiritual science knows that the scientific view is right
that this everyday consciousness is dependent on its tools. If
you deepen the everyday consciousness in the mystic sense, even
if you may make it ever so internal and subtle, you stop in it
and you attain nothing but something that is dependent on the
bodily organisation. You can find mystics who raise the human
heart by high poetic beauty, by wonderful imagination, by a
strange intuition for all kinds of averted things and refresh
the human soul so that they almost amaze you by these
things.

However, at last you wake from this amazement repeatedly with
the sensation: yes, the whole is nothing but an, indeed, more
intimate, often ingenious imagination and thinking which is
bound with finer, ingeniously developed forces of the bodily
organisation. You can find kind, imposing mystics about whom
you must still say: their mystic experiences are nothing but
refined, or we say, spiritualised passions, affects, feelings
that are similar, however, to those of the usual life. Such
mystics have only brought along their bodies by all kinds of
ascetic means or predispositions so that the body maybe becomes
able to feel in quite different directions as it is the case
with usual human beings, but it is, in the end, the bodily
organisation. Often the liveliest explanations and outpourings
of such mystics show that they are averted, indeed, from the
usual sensory life, but that they have brought that in this
sensory life, only spiritualising, which their imagination can
experience. Hence, someone who thinks scientifically calls the
experiences of such mystics unusual with a certain right
because they deviate from the usual experience. He calls them
maybe unhealthy, but he will be right also while he says, they
prove nothing at all against the dependence of the human soul
life on the bodily organisation, even if it appears in
mystic-refined way. The bodily organisation has only been
trained as it were, so that that which appears, otherwise, in
crude sensuousness expresses itself in spiritual pictures, in
metaphors, in symbols in the soul behind which the expert can
still find nothing but refined expressions of the usual
passions.

On
the other hand, spiritual science says, if one refines the
usual consciousness so mystically if one may
“spiritualise” it ever so much, so that it brings a
feeling of the union with the spirit, within this usual
consciousness one does not get to that sphere which one
searches, actually, if one speaks of the deeper soul riddles.
In particular just the trained observation of the spiritual
researcher shows that also everything that the human being can
have in the usual experience in his soul and can keep his
memories is bound to the bodily organisation. So that the human
being does not come out of this bodily organisation with his
memories, and one is allowed to say, a real
spiritual-scientific introspection just shows that the more
exactly memory keeps the experiences, the more the activity of
memory is bound to the bodily organisation. — Hence,
spiritual science takes methods, which are quite different from
those of the usual consciousness. Even if this usual
consciousness keeps the memories exactly because the bodily
organisation functions well and the experiences are exactly
brought up after long time: spiritual science has to take
methods different from those, which the usual consciousness
knows. In the last talks, I have already pointed to that what
just arises as observation of the thinking and want only to
repeat it from another viewpoint.

Indeed, the usual thinking is the starting point of any
spiritual-scientific research, and only someone finds this
starting point who already brings to his mind by a true
observation of this thinking that it is already something
spiritual. However, one cannot stop at this point. One cannot
stop with the view that this thinking, as well as it arises in
the usual life, is the last. It is not the last even if it has
apparently spiritualised itself mostly, namely in the mental
pictures of memory. Hence, I said, everything that the human
being can feel, think, and will in the usual life does not lead
to a knowledge of the nature of the soul. Rather — this
is only one of many measures that must be experienced the human
being has to develop his thinking in such a way that he is no
longer involved with his personality, with his subjectivity. If
we advance with our thinking so far only that mental pictures
develop and are searched which can be kept and appear again, we
get, nevertheless, only to that which comes about by the tools
of the bodily organisation.

Therefore, you have to develop this thinking in such a way that
you are no longer present at this development. However, it
requires also that you have the patience and perseverance not
to believe that the big world riddles can be decided in the
twinkling of an eye; you need something quite different for
that. It requires the secrets of the whole course of human
life. It requires the patience to develop such inner methods
the life of which cannot be taken in at a moment, but can only
develop if you leave them to the development that they can
experience in the course of the human life.

I
have indicated that one calls this “meditative
life” if one brings in certain mental pictures, best of
all those which one can exactly survey, so that some unaware or
other memories of life do not appear, and then experiences
these mental pictures really in all directions with quiet
consciousness. If you observe not only how you remember these
mental pictures in the usual consciousness again, but also
leave these mental pictures as it were from the usual
consciousness because you are no longer present at their
development, then you will always find if you have perseverance
and patience enough that the mental pictures submerge in the
subsoil of the human consciousness where you do no longer know
anything about them. Then you can find out how they appear
again in memory.

Spiritual research has no use for that at first. But something
else takes place. For someone who develops his soul life it
becomes apparent that the mental pictures, indeed, appear again
as memories just as the others after months, years, but that
these mental pictures show no true recollection, but that they
have developed his soul life that they have changed it in a
certain area. These mental pictures do not emerge in the same
form, but they emerge and announce themselves in such a way
that you have to say to yourself, they have worked not in your
personal, but in that which is beneath your conscious personal.
They have developed their power and appear in another figure
now. You can say without thinking, if the mental picture meets
again with that which has become from it, without being present
with our consciousness, this meeting of the mental picture of
the usual consciousness with the changed mental picture
emerging from the unconscious shows that you can see its
efficacy for the human soul life. This meeting shows that the
human being still stands in a life area that is quite different
from that of the physical-sensory reality that really in the
subsoil of the soul life something unconscious or subconscious
lives that can be brought up by suitable methods, and that
penetrates consciousness different from the usual memory.

Spiritual science stands on the viewpoint that by suitable
treatment of our soul life the unconscious can emerge in the
conscious, but should emerge only if it has reached its
development in the unconscious. Thereby spiritual science
reaches the beholding consciousness. Since something is
experienced that can be compared with the transition from the
usual dream life to the wake consciousness. We get to know the
subjective pictures in the dream that we regard as realities,
while we are dreaming. While we are waking, we know by the
immediate contact with the outer reality that the dream has
only brought pictures, namely the pictures that ascend from our
organic inside and appear as symbols.

Nobody will be tempted to believe that one develops a
consciousness for that which the dream is in reality; nobody
can dream what the dream is. Against it if you come from the
dream into the usual consciousness and try to explain the dream
from the usual consciousness, you recognise its
fantastic-chaotic-pictorial nature. The same applies if you
move from the usual consciousness to the beholding one in the
described way. There you come from the outer physical-sensory
reality to the the word is contestable higher, spiritual
reality. You awake in another world that throws light on the
usual physical-sensory world while the world of the usual
consciousness throws light on the dream world. Hence, spiritual
science does not only think different about the world riddles
and soul riddles, but above all, it realises that you have
first to attain another consciousness from the depths of the
soul to enter into the spiritual worlds. Now I can bring in
certain results only.

But
already with reference to the nearest scientific spiritual
science has to deviate from science, just as it agrees with
natural sciences. Spiritual science completely agrees with the
scientific conscience and attitude of modern natural sciences.
However, it cannot stop at the scientific thinking. That is why
the spiritual scientist will have a good basis if he has
developed his thinking, his imagining, his feeling with the
most scientific mental pictures, and today these are those
which are imbued with mathematics most of all.

It
will be different once if the biological sciences, physiology
and so on, are as far as the inorganic natural sciences are.
But the spiritual researcher cannot stop thinking about the
world as natural sciences think about the world. He can keep
his thinking as it were in strict discipline, while he trains
it based on the strict thinking of science. If he has educated
himself in such a way, he has created the best ground as a
spiritual-scientific researcher. Hence, one can compare the
nature of spiritual science to that which happened with the
impetus of modern scientific thinking. I have often pointed out
that with the Copernican worldview the human beings had to
rethink the outer world, that that which Copernicus asserted
seemed to be absurd to the human beings at first because it
contradicted the phenomena of the outer sensory world. If one
just argues against spiritual science that it contradicts the
statements of the outer sensory world, then one has to point
out repeatedly that just astronomy attained its big progress by
Copernicus because it did not remain at that which the outer
senses showed, but that it overcame it courageously. If one
recognised the inner nerve of such a reversal just in
scientific field, then one would put fewer ignorant objections
forward against spiritual science, as it still happens.
However, today I want still to allege one point where spiritual
science is in a similar situation as the Copernican worldview
was when it contributed to the progress of natural
sciences.

Even if the Copernican worldview has to undergo some
corrections, if we want to advance, we cannot put the earth in
the centre of the planetary system and let the sun circle
around it. But we have to turn the sensory false fact
completely upside down: we have to put the sun in the centre of
the planetary system and let the planets circle around the sun.
You know that the Copernican worldview long was not accepted by
certain circles. One had to develop new mental pictures; one
had to get used to having other mental pictures than those were
which one had for centuries.

Now
it is somewhat more difficult in the area of spiritual science
to figure an analogous out just in its area, but only because
it is in the position today in which the Copernican worldview
was at the moment of its appearance. The mental pictures which
spiritual science has to develop are quite unusual, and they
have to cover a similar distance with reference to a certain
point in the human soul life, as the Copernican worldview had
to cover once. For the usual soul life, for the usual
observation is nothing clearer than that the human being is
born with his soul, experiences the course of his life that his
soul or his ego changes in the course of this life gradually.
One considers the soul being as walking through life from birth
to death, as if it goes along. However, spiritual science shows
the strange fact that the soul being with which the idea of
immortality is connected does not take part in the course of
life in the usual sense. As little as the sun circles around
the earth, the human ego or the human soul experiences the way
from birth to death. Therefore, the matter is different:

We
remember in the later life up to a certain point that lies some
years after our birth. Only up to this point, the ego or soul
being goes along with our development. Then it stops in time,
and the proceeding course of life does not take along the ego.
The course of life reflects that what proceeds in it to the
resting soul. The mental picture is so difficult because it is
just easier to imagine the rest in space, than the rest in
time. However, if you think that certain circles accepted the
Copernican worldview only in 1827, you can also assume that
spiritual science can take its time, until the human beings are
able to imagine that resting in time is possible. One can say,
the soul just stays behind resting in itself, and life proceeds
up to death, while the experiences are reflected to that what
stays behind at the mentioned time. With it, however, something
else is connected: the fact that the soul being does not emerge
in those events and facts that are connected with the bodily
life that the soul remains in its real being in the spiritual.
That is why it does not enter the usual course of life because
this course just flows into the sensory-physical events. The
soul remains in the spiritual.

The
usual consciousness absolutely proceeds with the usual life
between birth and death. But the true soul being does not
pervade this bodily being, but stops in the spiritual. That is
why this soul being cannot attain knowledge in the usual life,
but only if the consciousness blanks out itself if the thought
remaining in the consciousness meets the subconsciously working
thought. Then, however, this subconscious work spreads about
the whole human life gradually, as far as life is passed
through. The human being knows himself standing in the
spiritual life in his inner experience at the starting point of
his life on earth, before the border up to which memory
reaches, but raised above the time in which the usual
consciousness runs. Hence, no mysticism that wants to bring a
subtler experience than the usual one deeply into the
consciousness, which proceeds in time, can reach the soul
being. However, this soul being can be reached only if time is
overcome, if the human being advances with his inner experience
beyond this time developing his soul to find the soul first, as
it is in its inner nature.

These are difficult mental pictures, but they are difficult
because the human beings got used to thinking different in the
course of centuries. The human being must not search a union
with the spiritual, while he wants to develop
spiritual-scientific methods, in the sense of the usual
mysticism with the usual consciousness. However, that what he
searches must be an object to him. He has to approach it with
the consciousness that it is something strange, actually, to
the usual life that it has stopped, before this usual soul life
has appeared. Then only he knows: this soul worked with the
forces that it also had before in the spiritual, on the
arrangement of the whole life down to the bodily organisation,
while it connected its power with that which the human being
has attained from the physical heredity. Thus, the human being
reaches the immortal of the soul.

The
question of immortality changes for spiritual science compared
with the form that one gives this question, otherwise. One
always thinks, one can answer it if one puts it in the
following way: is the soul with its usual thinking, feeling,
and willing in such a way that it keeps anything of them as
immortal? Thinking, feeling, and willing in the usual life are
as they are because the soul has to use the bodily tools. If
these bodily tools are cast off at death, the form of thinking,
feeling, and willing also stops, of course. Against that lives
in every human being which is just hidden for the usual soul
observation that stops before the gate of memory. This can take
up the events of the usual life, while it is reflected. And if
that which is in this usual life is taken away from the human
being at death, then that which never has left the spiritual
world will also walk through the gate of death. This has not
developed within the usual consciousness, but this has
developed in the subconscious that can be brought up just only
in the described way.

Thus, the question changes for spiritual science in such a way
that the spiritual researcher shows above all in what way the
true soul being is found, and while he shows this way,
immortality turns out as truth by the way how this true soul
being is. As one does not need to prove that the rose is red if
one has led somebody to a rose, and he faces it, one does not
need to prove by all kinds of hypotheses, conclusions and so on
that the soul being is immortal if one shows the way by which
the human being finds the soul being so that he realises: it is
the producer of the mortal, the mortal is its revelation if one
can indicate immortality as a quality of this soul being, as
well as one indicates the red colour as a quality of the rose.
It just matters that the question completely changes if
spiritual science approaches this soul riddle.

It
becomes somewhat clearer what I have only indicated sketchily
by a side lighting, one would like to say, if you throw a
glance on something that plays such a significant role in the
human life that seems inaccessible, however, to most
philosophers: if you throw a side glance on the human destiny.
The human destiny appears in the succession of events to many
people as a sum of contingencies; it appears to many people as
a predetermined necessity, as a necessity of providence.
However, all these mental pictures approach the riddle of
destiny again from the viewpoint of the usual consciousness.
Even if these mental pictures are deepened so mystically, one
does not get closer to such riddles by these mental pictures.
Hence, I have shown last time just with reference to the
question of destiny that you have to prepare yourself first in
the right way for this question of human destiny. I have to
repeat this once again from a certain viewpoint, so that I can
more exactly speak about this question. I said, if the
spiritual researcher dedicates himself to certain developments,
one kind of which I have shown with the development of
thinking, this inner development signifies a real lifting out
of the usual consciousness; it is no mystic deepening of this
usual consciousness only, but an ascent to that what does not
at all enter into the usual consciousness. Then you need much
patience and perseverance to continue this inner development.
It does not need to interfere with the outer life in the
slightest. Those human beings are bad spiritual researchers who
become impractical for the usual life by spiritual research.
They show that they are still materialistically minded
people.

Since someone who is torn out of the usual life who is torn out
of life praxis by a kind of spiritual research shows that he
has not understood the nature of true spiritual research; since
this proceeds in the spiritual which cannot immediately
conflict with the usual life. Someone who believes that he can
enter into the spiritual world, for example, by fasting or by
another outer means shows just that he is completely permeated
with materialist mental pictures. However, if the human being
goes the way of true spiritual research or spiritual science,
then at the right time that becomes gradually a question of
destiny, an inner twist of fate what the human being
experiences there internally. He experiences an inner
penetration that carries him into the sphere of the spiritual,
so vividly, so intensely that this experience that completely
proceeds without interference of the outer experience, becomes
a twist of fate which is more important than anyone of the
outer life. Yes, just in that the significant of spiritual
science appears that it can become a twist of fate for the
human being. The human being does not need to become
emotionally dulled for the other twists of fate; he may fully
feel the outer destinies, not only those of him, but also those
of others if he has also experienced the higher twist of fate
that proceeds completely internally.

Someone is not on the right way who dulls his compassion and
sympathy for the outer world and the human beings. But with
someone who is in the social life and stands in a spiritual
world it can still be that a time enters at which he feels this
inner experience as a twist of fate, which is bigger and more
urgent than the most dreadful strokes of fate or the happiest
twist of fate which he can otherwise experience. However, the
fact that such a twist of fate can happen deepens the mind and
internalises the soul; it endows the soul with the forces that
rest, indeed, always in the soul but that are not brought up
normally.

Firstly, the soul is prepared above all: while the soul has
experienced a destiny completely internally, so that it faces
this destiny now with the internally experienceable soul
forces, the human being gets to know the biggest twist of fate
so intimately that he gains a yardstick of knowledge for the
outer destiny. You need a yardstick for everything in life. You
receive the yardstick for the judgement of destiny by the fact
that you do not only consider the dark destinies by all kinds
of speculation, but that you consider such a bright destiny as
one experiences it by the fact that one has gradually developed
the power in his inner soul life that one has watched
everything. You realise that it has become this way for years;
we have gradually attained inner, true conviction of the
spiritual world without self-deception in which we live. We
were there with the twist of fate, there it faces us not as
something that remains dark, with which we can be pleased, or
from which we can suffer only, but there it faces us in bright
inner clearness.

If
we have developed the forces that face us in bright inner
clearness, then only we can light up that with inner light what
remains dark, then we can also consider the events of the outer
destiny. These events of the outer destiny are dark for the
usual consciousness. However, the usual consciousness has
become the beholding consciousness for the consideration of the
question of destiny just because it allows such a twist of fate
to happen. For the question of destiny, this consciousness has
advanced to the beholding consciousness. Thereby one attains
that generally only which is necessary to approach the question
of destiny in such a way that one can elucidate it to a certain
degree. However, thereby appears that all statements about
destiny remain hypothetical or empty fantastic assumptions.
Since it becomes apparent that destiny appears only in its
revelation, in its projection into the usual consciousness
that, however, this destiny works in the subconscious on the
human soul, so that it lives in the subconscious in the stream
of destiny. Thus, it lives in the stream of destiny that its
involvement appears as little in the destiny to the usual
consciousness as that appears to the dreamer, which surrounds
him as physical reality in the outer world.

If
one exercises the beholding consciousness, one can look at the
question of destiny with quite different spiritual eyes. Then
the soul can look quite different at the connections of a twist
of fate from anyone who looks at them with the usual
consciousness. One recognises only upon which one has to direct
the attention in the question of destiny if one is prepared for
it because one was deeply moved by a wholly spiritual twist of
fate. Let us take any twist of fate that can easily face us in
the outer life. As typical for that which faces us in the outer
life one could tell the following: a person has completely
prepared himself for any outer occupation. His predispositions
show that he could fully be up to this work. The things were
thriven so far that the post was already found which the person
concerned should get. Everything was prepared. Then, just
before this person receives the answer that he is transferred
to the post, an accident happens by which he becomes incapable
to occupy this post.

If
one looks at the human life with the usual consciousness, one
does it in such a way that one looks at that which has preceded
any fact in life. One looks at the world in such a way that one
always strings effect and cause together and again effect and
cause so that one always goes back from the later to the
former. If the person is ready to recognise this twist of fate
that can teach us something, it appears that we are concerned
with that twist of fate with a convergence of two series of
events. Here in the typical example we deal, on one side, with
the fact that the human being has become something by which he
forced processes of the outer world to be directed towards
him.

Another series of events thwarts the first. You just get to
know if you look at such processes of destiny, that it is
proper to regard the human life as one regards processes of
nature, while one pays attention how the later follows from the
former. However, you also get to know that this view is
extremely one-sided. You get to know that you cannot only
consider the ascending series of events if you want to look at
the complete existence, but that you have also to consider the
descending series, which always thwarts and destroys the
ascending one. Then you get to the point by the meeting of both
series where the spirit reveals itself to you. Since the human
being has not become different, while on one side that was
thwarted which he has become; two streams of life have met with
each other, but the human being has not become different. Just
the fact that you come across with your soul forces into this
thwarting of both life streams shows how at the moment when
something should work fatefully on the human soul it has to
withdraw from the outer life. You get to the inside of the soul
this way, which is not at all taken up in the outer sensory
life. While one seizes the existence, where it reveals itself
not only, but where it disappears from the outer manifestation,
one finds the way into that area which the soul does not at all
leave and in which destiny works on it.

Now
you also realise that it absolutely is in the nature of the
soul that destiny relates to the soul as I have just shown it.
Since let us accept that the matter would be in such a way that
the human soul approaches the concatenation of destiny with
mental pictures of the outer sensory reality. What would follow
from it? It would follow that the soul would remain internally
dead that it would internally face the destiny as calm not to
say as indifferently as it faces the statements of natural
sciences. However, the human soul does not face destiny this
way. I do not only develop ideas of purposefulness. Someone who
dwells on the methods of that which I brought forward here will
realise that I do not regress to teleological ideas or ideas of
purposefulness, but that I put the question in such a way: what
is necessary to the being of the soul?

As
far as the soul is in destiny, it does not experience at all by
cognitive mental pictures, but it experiences it in such a way
that affects, sensations, feelings of joy, feelings of grief
appear in this soul, and that clear mental pictures of these
sensations do not exist as one has them, otherwise, of
knowledge. However, if clear mental pictures of them existed,
they would be just such mental pictures that work only in the
sphere of the usual consciousness. Just while the experience of
destiny is lifted out from these mental pictures that are bound
to the body, it remains in the subconscious or more precisely
is led down into the subconscious. The experience of destiny
thereby works beyond the consciousness on the soul being as the
experiences of the outer world happen round the dreamer,
without penetrating his consciousness at least not
immediately.

How
the human being experiences his sufferings and joys causes that
his destiny is led into the deeper subconscious regions of the
soul life, so that destiny urges the human being in life below
the threshold of the usual consciousness. Down there, however,
where the consciousness does not reach, is order; down there
the experiences of destiny are reflected to the soul which has
stopped before the border of sensation. Destiny is perpetually
working there on our soul, so that the human being cannot
figure the way out with the usual consciousness how he stands
in his destiny. The destiny combines with the soul below the
threshold of consciousness. There, however, it appears,
howsoever this destiny may be designed, that it is connected
intimately with the soul that it is just the worker who forms
our soul life. It is one of the workers who cause that that
which we experience in the life between birth and death is
carried over to the soul which goes through birth and death to
repeated lives on earth. Thus, this soul is carried through
repeated lives on earth by performances, by forces, by effects
which do not reach the usual consciousness. There we see the
conjunction of the human destiny with the human soul. There we
get by destiny to the subconscious, everlasting grounds of the
human soul. Only where immortality prevails, destiny also
prevails in its true figure.

It
is carried to it because we are at the mercy of it in the usual
life that we do not penetrate it recognising. Because we
experience destiny emotionally, it is carried over into that
region where it can work on the immortal soul part. Then
destiny turns out to be the great teacher of life. Destiny
carries us forward. It is true what single persons feel about
the continuity in the human destiny. I would like to read out
such an example to you. Goethe's friend Knebel (Karl Ludwig von
K., 1744-1834) got to mental pictures of destiny in old age,
which did not arise to him really by speculations, not by
philosophical pipe dreams, but they shine as it were from the
subconscious soul life when destiny works on the soul. There
Knebel says:

“One will find with precise observation that in the lives
of most human beings a certain plan exists which is
predetermined for them as it were, by their own nature, or by
the circumstances. The states of their lives may be ever so
varied and variable, a whole still appears at the end that
shows a certain accordance among them. The hand of a certain
destiny appears, even if it works covertly, it may be moved by
any outer effect or inner emotion: yes, contradicting reasons
often move in its direction. May the course be ever so
confused; reason and direction always shine through.”

He
did not speculate this, but this is a result that the soul has
taken out of the region where destiny works on it. Hence, only
human beings who with full internal interest participate in the
events not only of the own life, but of many human beings, see
such a view about destiny shining up from the depths of their
souls at a certain time of their life.

Well, questions of science, also of spiritual science do not
depend on any outer events questions of science, questions of
knowledge take their course , rather the outer life is
determined in many of its peculiarities by that which science
brings to light. However, on the other side certain outer
circumstances contribute that people can appreciate knowledge
in the right way. One has only to remind of the fact that the
Venus courses in front of the sun that happen only twice a
century must be waited until they happen that there the outer
circumstances must be, so that a certain knowledge appears in a
certain area. Thus, it can also be with the questions of
spiritual science that refer to the soul life. Although it does
not really belong to spiritual science, the feeling, living in
our destiny-burdened time, can still be directed to the fact
that just our time brings that home to the human beings in the
deepest sense of the word what spiritual science can give.

The
old Heraclitus said once, while he pointed to the dream life:
in relation to the dream world, every human being has his own
world. Most different persons can sleep in a room, and
everybody can dream the most different; there everybody has his
own dream world. When they wake, they all are in common outer
surroundings. These common surroundings stimulate a big soul
picture; there they are in a unity. In an even bigger, more
important unity are the human beings if they look at that what
the beholding consciousness gets from the spiritual world.
There the human beings get together, and it is a delusion if
one believes that the one claims this, the other that. The one
may calculate correctly, the other wrongly, but the arithmetic
method remains right. In a higher sense, the human beings form
a unity if they move up to the beholding consciousness and
enter into the spiritual world. However, the outer relations
can also lead the human beings to a certain unity in life. Then
these experiences can stimulate something that strives for the
unity of life: for spiritual science. We live in fateful events
that unite the human beings in another way than they are united
from the outside. Common fateful experiences spread about the
human beings. This can be a suggestion, and will be a
suggestion, as I hope, to turn the human beings to the serious
ways of spiritual science in this destiny-burdened time.

Then we can also accept: even if spiritual science has always
to say most important things concerning the everlasting
questions, the questions of destiny and life arise especially
deeply in our time. Spiritual science can thereby give the
human beings particular forces, so that they go through all
twists of fate with the consciousness what destiny signifies
for immortality, for the everlasting life and wait for that
which is born from this destiny-burdened time. If one learns to
understand destiny, one also learns when it is necessary to
face destiny with true tranquillity. The soul often works more
powerfully in its rest than it can work if it is carried on the
waves of the outer life.

Maybe just the consciousness of the standstill of the soul in
our life as abstract this mental picture even today may appear
is a mental picture which can go over in the basic forces of
the human mind and can there become a big mover that does not
destroy the soul but invigorates it. Since just as it is
inaccurate for somebody who has a magnet to say, this is
nothing but a piece of iron in form of a horseshoe, and you are
a daydreamer if you believe that there are particular forces
inside as it is wrong to consider someone who cannot show the
forces at first by the attraction of iron, but only claims
them, to consider him as a daydreamer. It is wrong to consider
someone as a daydreamer who speaks of the outer life proceeding
in the physical-sensory existence in such a way that this life
is not only that as it appears to the outer senses, but that it
is penetrated with the spiritual, in which the soul is rooted
and lives. Since the words of Heraclitus remain true:

“Eyes and ears are witnesses of that which goes forward
in the world, witnesses towards the human being; however, they
are bad witnesses towards those human beings whose souls do not
understand the true language of the eyes and ears.”

Spiritual science wants to speak the true language of the eyes
and ears and find the way with them into that which for the
usual consciousness eyes and ears cannot show. Hence, the human
being works best if he is aware that he not only comes as an
everlasting from this everlasting source of life, but lives
also always in it.